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<h1>Newsletter Composer Instructions</h1>
<h2>Overview</h2>
<p>This is designed the greatly ease the process of sending out regular newsletters
as emails with embedded HTML (this way the recipient can read your nicely formatted newsletter
without having to open any attachments).</p>
<p>This is the process:</p>
<ol>
<li>You type the content of your newsletter into the online form.</li>
<li>This content is used with a template to automatically generate HTML files which you can look at:
<ul><li>One to be sent as an email</li><li>One to be hosted online</li><li>One to be printed</li></ul>
</li>
<li>You input the names and email addresses of recipients or import them from a spreadsheeet,
adding any personal greetings to individuals that you want.</li>
<li>The email gets automatically personalised for each individual and sent to them using
a mail server that you specify.</li>
</ol>
<p><strong>Note: Last time I checked Newsletter Composer does not work in Internet Explorer</strong> Try downloading a stable
secure standards-compliant browser such as <a href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Chrome</a> or <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/" >Firefox</a></p>

<h2>Newsletter Content</h2>
<p>The first part of the form is where you enter content for your newsletter.</p>
<p>The clear button allows you to clear all existing content.</p>
<p>Currently there is only one template available, which determines the appearance of the generated newsletter.</p>
<p>The header and footer sections each have three tabs. One for each format type that gets generated. This will allow you to have different
content in the header and footer for each type of file format. For example you might like to put your postal address in the printed newsletter
and a link to your blog in the web and email versions, etc.</p>
<p>Below the header you should enter a title for the newsletter and an issue number. You may also enter a date for the issue (you can put that date in any format you like).
When the newsletter is generated the names of the HTML files that are produced are based on the newsletter title and issue number. This means if you generate a newsletter
with the same title AND issue number as a previous newsletter the files for that previous one will be overwritten.</p>
<p>To the right are some button you may optionaly use to upload a logo image for your organisation and a photo of yourself or family.</p>
<p>The newsletter is arranged in two columns. To add an article to the left column use the left-hand Add Article button
and to add an article to the right column use the right-hand one.</p>
<p>once an article is added There is space to put a title for the article. This is optional and if you leave it out the template should be clever enough to not leave
an empty space in the HTML files where the title would have been. Also there are two button one for adding text to the article and one for adding images. You may use
those buttons as many times as you like for each article to interdisperse the images with the text.</p>
<p>Items added to an article can be moved up or down with relation to each other or deleted using the controls that
appear to the top-right of the item. There are also controls that allow the same actions for whole articles too.</p>
<p>When entering text, starting a new line (by pressing enter once) will cause the generated text to also begin a new line at the same place and leaving a blank
line causes a paragraph break. If a line begins with a hyphen followed by a space then it is treated by the template as an item in a bulleted list.</p>
<p>To make text emphasised (italic) put a double underscore at the beginning and end. To make it strongly emphasised (bold) use a double asterisk at the beginning and end.
The two forms of emphasis can be nested into themselves and into each other to a certain extent.</p>
<p>To put a hyper-link into the text put the text to be linked in braces and then immediately follow it with the target URL in square brackets.</p>
<p>If you want to link to the web version of the current newsletter you can enter '%WEB URL% which will be replaced by the URL of the web version when the newsletter is generated.</p>
<p>Large images are automatically resized to a width of 600 pixels before they are uploaded to the server. After they are
uploaded you can see a preview at 200 pixels.</p>
<p>All content entered into the newsletter is remembered by the browser for up to one year, so you can leave the page and return again
without loosing your content. If you return to the page from a different computer or browser your content will not be
restored. (I hope to change this behaviour in the near future) However there is the ability to save the content of the newsletter into a file using the Save button, and to
load it from that file using the Load button. In this way to form content can be transfered between computers.</p>
<h2>Generate Newsletter</h2>
<p>Once you have finished inputing the content of the newsletter use the Generate Newsletter button to generate
the HTML files. All generated files are stored online. The default is to have these files stored publicaly, but above the Generate button there is an option to password-protect
all online content. You get to choose a username and password that will be needed to see any of your newsletters in a web browser. It will still be possible to see uploaded images
without the password, but only out of context - this is necessary because the emails that get sent out link to these images and the emails wouldn't display properly if the images themselves
are password-protected. If you password protect your online content and you also link to the web version from the eail version, then it might be a good idea to provide the username and
password in the email version too.</p>
<p>When the files are generated links to them will appear below the button so you can preview them. Make any
changes you want and generate them again. You can generate them as many times as you like. Each time you press the generate button the old files are overwritten unless you changes the issue
number or title of the newsletter.</p>
<p>Whenever the page is refreshed the links to the generated files disappears, but the files are still there. Regenerate
to get the links back.</p>
<h2>Sending the Newsletter</h2>
<p>You can enter the recipients of the newsletter manually. Enter the name and email address of a recipient. When you start
typing another row appears below for adding more.</p><p>It is also possible to import recipients from an Excel spreadsheet. To do this use the controls below the recipients
table. Choose a file to import and click Go. The format of the spreadsheet is as follows:</p>
<table summary="Excel spreadsheet import format" >
<tr><th>Email</th><th>Dear</th><th>Name</th></tr>
<tr><td>email@example.com</td><td>Jonny</td><td>John Smith</td></tr>
<tr><td>another.email@sample.org</td><td></td><td>Jane W. Doe</td></tr>
</table>
<p>This file format matches that format exported from Donor Manger when you choose to make a spreadsheet of emails.
The name for the recipient is taken from the Dear field, but if this field is empty the first word from the name field
is used instead.</p>
<p>When you import recipients the page refreshes. This means you will have to press the Generate Newsletter button
again before you can send.</p>
<p>Each newsletter that get sent may be personalised. There is a button next
to each person's entry field that allows you to add up to two personal messages. These will take the place of any occurances in your newsletter text of %PERSONAL A% and %PERSONAL B% respectively
only for that particular recipient. If nothing is entered here then the messages use to replace the place holders will be the generic ones entered at the top of the columns.</p>
<p>You may also use %NAME% and %EMAIL ADDRESS% to insert those fields into the newsletter.</p>
<p>Those four fields (%NAME%, %EMAIL ADDRESS%, %PERSONAL A% and %PERSONAL B%) will only work for the email format of the newsletter, so it is best to put them in the email header or email footer.</p>
<p>Below the recipients enter the email address that the email will appear to come from and the subject line for the email.</p>
<p>Finally you must specify a mail server to deliver the emails. You can find the information to put in these fields
from whoever manages your emails. You just need the outgoing mail (SMTP) settings. For example, if you want to use your gmail account to send out the emails you can find
the <a href="http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287">relevent information</a> from Google.</p>
<p>Click Send to send your email to all the recipients. If this button is greyed out try regenerating the newsletter.
The emails will be sent individually at one second intervals and a list of the results will begin appearing to the right.
If any email fails to send you will get a Fail message next to that person's name. If, once all the emails are sent, just
a few have failed, then clear all recipients except for those few and try resending. If all the emails failed then you have
a problem that an IT technician needs to sort out for you.</p>
<p>If you have any feedback use this <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1cQoTwTyWFGSvBKeUTcjtb49GQYtXFtv7WyYdrovoFHE/viewform">feedback form</a></p>
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